Scandal draws mixed response to pontiff

Sunday

Mar 28, 2010 at 12:01 AM

NEW BEDFORD — While the Roman Catholic Church's latest abuse scandal spreads across Europe, SouthCoast reactions are decidedly split as Pope Benedict XVI finds himself at the vortex of a storm of questions about his own possible involvement in handling cases.

STEVE URBON

NEW BEDFORD — While the Roman Catholic Church's latest abuse scandal spreads across Europe, SouthCoast reactions are decidedly split as Pope Benedict XVI finds himself at the vortex of a storm of questions about his own possible involvement in handling cases.

Benedict has one of his biggest defenders in the Rev. Roger Landry, pastor of St.. Anthony's of Padua Church in New Bedford and editor of the diocesan newspaper, The Anchor.

Landry had a casual acquaintance with Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, when he was in Rome as a young priest in the late 1990s.

Landry gives Benedict credit for seizing control of the sexual abuses cases by intervening after local bishops failed to deal with the problem at the local level in one diocese after another.

"It started to become clear after the (James) Porter episode. The Vatican recognized U.S. bishops were not doing their job relative to protecting innocent children and using the power of canon law to punish priests," Landry said.

"So what the Vatican did from this point forward was to make sure that these cases were no longer not being disciplined, to bring it all to the Vatican," he said.

The result, according to the Vatican's chief prosecutor, Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, was that 3,000 priests were put through the process. Twenty percent were given full church trials and only some were defrocked. Ten percent were defrocked immediately. Another 10 percent left voluntarily. Sixty percent faced lesser "administrative and disciplinary provisions," such as being prohibited from celebrating mass.

Landry praised Benedict for his lengthy pastoral letter to the church in Ireland last week, decrying the abuse scandal there. And he believes that Benedict's frequent use of the word "filth" to describe child molesters indicates the depth of his commitment to purge them from the church.

The New York Times last week published articles suggesting that Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was bishop of Munich, and probably knew about the reassignment of an abuser, Landry said he doesn't believe the circumstances were as the paper described, and it is his understanding that the abuser was reassigned without the cardinal's knowledge after he was no longer dealing with the case.

Another case, that of a Milwaukee priest whose Vatican trial was abruptly halted, involved the Vatican in 1996 not because it was an abuse case, Landry said, but because the priest was accused of one of the 6 offenses under Canon Law that can be resolved only by the pope, in this case solicitation of sex in the confessional.

All of this has left the skeptics even more skeptical. Yet even some of the church's severest critics aren't ready to indict Benedict or call for his resignation.

Estelle Roach, of Fall River, who represents the lay group Voice of the Faithful in the Fall River Diocese, said that there continues to be a serious problem with the lack of accountability and transparency regarding bishops. That would be "very painful and serious situation," she said. "But until that happens, this is what's going to happen. It's just going top keep coming up as much as they say they want to put it behind them."

"It's just a horror story. People wish it would just die and go away. Sadly, I don't think that's ever going to happen." she said,

"The sexual abuse of children is soul murder. Those people pay every day of their lives for the rest of their lives for that trauma. That just sends the wrong message and it hurts the church," she said.

Despite that, Roach was cautious about accusing Benedict of being directly involved in mishandling abuse cases. However, she said, starting with cases in Louisiana in the 1980s, "there just seems to be a link that keeps going back and back to the question of the Vatican's involvement. If the Vatican protected that (Milwaukee) priest, I think it raises new questions," she said.

Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the Boston archbishop who spent 10 post-Porter years as bishop of the Fall River Diocese, issued no statement on the church's current travails beyond what he wrote on his blog site Friday.

Discussing only the Ireland letter and not the New York Times articles, O'Malley wrote, "I realize that some people have criticized the letter, but I think it was an important step in moving Ireland towards healing. As I read the letter, I couldn't help but think that I wish we had a similar letter years ago, when this crisis began in the United States."

Bishop George Coleman of Fall River had no comment when his office was contacted by The Standard-Times.